Chelle Rose makes peace with her muse

Not long ago, but for a long time, Chelle (pronounced like “Shelly”) Rose packed her guitars in cases and took them to her basement.

There they sat, unopened and unvisited, for the year that Rose quit music. She didn’t quit listening: Sometimes she’d go to a concert at the Ryman, watch one of her heroes perform and feel a deep sadness. It wasn’t that she thought she should be up there on that hallowed stage; it was that she knew she was embroiled in a strange, unrequited love affair with her muse: The music loved her, and she refused to love it back.

“I would watch someone singing, going down into that place that was very fulfilling for me, even if for me it was just on my couch in my living room,” she says. “But I know what it is to fall into that place. And I knew that I wasn’t being true to who I am. It was like holding a mirror up to myself, and going, ‘You’re living a lie.’ So I turned everything upside down, shook it out and started all over.”

And what has become of all that shaking? Neither fame nor fortune, nor a full-time booking agent nor a hard-nosed manager. But there’s an album now — a brave and stirring one — and we can listen to it, and Rose is proud of it. She’s proud to have opened those guitar cases back up, opened her heart back up and traveled down to Texas to make an album with one of her songwriting heroes: Renegade songsmith Ray Wylie Hubbard produced Rose’s newly issued Ghost of Browder Holler, and he says of Rose that she “is an artist willing to peel back the bark and lay bare the raw torn poetry of her East Tennessee amaranthine soul.”

“Amaranthine,” of course, is a cool-looking plant pigment. But you knew that already. And what Hubbard means is that Rose writes serious and unflinching narratives and that she doesn’t shy away from wounded subjects, even when she’s the wounded subject in question. And lots of folks agree with Hubbard about Chelle Rose.

In May, Rose opened up a New York Times and found a review of Ghost of Browder Holler right next to a review of Carrie Underwood’s Blown Away. Underwood plays arenas, while Rose plays clubs. Underwood is signed to a major label, while Rose is signed to her own Lil’ Damsel Records. (Negotiations were tense.) But there they were: Same page, same big-time publication. And there in black and white, it said Ghost of Browder Holler was “an album filled with rasp, drawl, twang and tenacity.”

“I went a little bit numb,” she says. “It’s sweet validation, but for a minute. And then you get back to work. I went a little bit numb, then went, ‘Oh, my goodness, I’ll get back to the laundry now.’ ”

Two weeks later, USA Today included Rose’s version of Julie Miller’s “I Need You” on its best-of-the-week list, alongside stuff from Willie Nelson, George Strait and Little Big Town. In mid-June, she was the Google Artist of the Week. And it became clear that songs Rose had conjured and practiced on her couch, in her Brentwood living room, were being heard and appreciated far from Middle Tennessee.

Ghost of Browder Holler is Rose’s sophomore effort, though it arrives 12 years after the independent release of her Nanahally River song-set. The years in between have seen significant personal turmoil: A divorce with children involved had a lot to do with the aforementioned time away from music. Rose doesn’t shy from writing her side of that and other stories, from sad-and-somehow-hilarious broken marriage romper “Alimony” to album-opening beloved ne’er do well’s tale “Browder Holler Boy.”

“I wrote some pretty dark songs,” she says. “I was working through some really intense emotional pain, from my childhood, and there was a lot of healing involved. Sometimes you write these songs and play them live, and sometimes you keep them to yourself, but it’s good any time you put down whatever you’re feeling. It helps me more than a psychiatrist can.”